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Surreal scenes from an art week amid protests, lessons from the NEA Four, and Kid Cudi’s Basquiat biopic.
When journalist Naima Morelli arrived in Paris last weekend, she could smell the scent of burning plastic in the air. Thus began her quest to report on the city’s surreal week of exhibitions and blue-chip art fairs, with million-dollar artworks changing hands as students protest deteriorating education and public service systems. Morelli captures the atmosphere, both dystopian and hopeful, in her dispatch below.
In another city with a rich history of protest, New York performance artist Martha Wilson reviews a history of the Culture Wars told in Isaac Butler’s new book The Perfect Moment, reflecting on the work of the NEA Four, David Wojnarowicz, and other artists who defended creative expression in a time not unlike our own. Also today, Duaa Shah takes a deep-dive into the way art circulates in the legal system as both treatment and evidence, particularly for displaced communities seeking justice.
More, as always, including a review of the Toronto Biennial and the unlikely star of a new Jean-Michel Basquiat biopic: Kid Cudi.
—Lakshmi Rivera Amin, associate editor, books
“The people in the art world are courageous,” a collector told me at Asia Now, the first of the Paris art fairs that opened early in the week on Monday, in the heat of the protests. “But I would still like to be back at my hotel before 7pm, you know, just in case.”
Anyone who is a regular at Paris Art Week has a collection of stories about something going wrong. In 2022, there were strikes and cost-of-living marches. In October 2023, France was on high terror alert, and one of the bomb threats that emptied the airports of the country’s major cities led to, among other things, my plane landing in the middle of the French countryside. A couple of trains later, and voilà: I was in Paris in time for the vernissages. | Naima Morelli
In the legal system, art created by refugees and incarcerated people can serve both as a form of therapy and as evidence of mass atrocities. | Duaa Shah
Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Transforming Remnants of War into Objects for Healing
Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s fourth solo exhibition with Norr Cohan, Sacred Forest / Rừng Thiêng, opens October 30 and will be on view through December 19, 2026, at the gallery’s 48 & 52 Walker Street locations. The exhibition will premiere a new film alongside suspended mobiles and a monumental stabile that extends the artist’s engagement with the people of the Quảng Trị region in Vietnam, whose lives are forever altered by the presence of unexploded ordnance.
Skirball Cultural Center presents “The 1960s — A Generation on Fire: Judy Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles”
The exhibition shares two new sections of the public art mural on view for the first time, featuring moments from an era of collective action that still resonates today.
It’s a provocative and discursive exploration of how artists respond to our late-capitalist epoch, but its focus on “rupture” raises questions. | Neil Price
As an artist who lived through the Reagan-era Culture Wars, I recommend Isaac Butler’s “The Perfect Moment” for the stories that parallel our current fight to defend creative expression. | Martha Wilson
Join us on October 28 in Brooklyn, NY for an evening of spooky cocktails, devilish delights, an art-themed costume contest, and more.
“I often say that my favorite material is the next one, the one I haven’t worked with yet.”
Hyperallergic speaks with Walter Cooper, who wrote the book on queer history in Santa Fe, and Christian Waguespack, who curated the show on it. | Jordan Eddy